If you listen to the radio even a little bit, you know that someone is out there 24/7 (And there is no depth to how much I hate that phrase. It’s right up there with “Billion with a ‘B’” and “The greatest thing since sliced bread”) telling you that you must incorporate.

“Incorporate or risk losing it all,” they implore. Or, “The advantages of incorporation are incalculable, including your ability to purchase assets through your corporation; which means that you pay in pre-tax dollars.” And on and on.

This is then followed up by an ad telling you that they will help you incorporate. They’ll even give you a shiny new minutes book for free - just as long as you use their handy and quick service.

At this point, I’m hoping you are thinking, “Somebody has to pay for all of these ads they are running” and “I wonder how they recover the money that they are spending by mailing out each ‘free’ packet of information and forms that is sent by first-class mail that very same day”.

But what you are likely not thinking is this … “Once I become a corporation, must I then behave like a corporation?” 

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I recently wrote a column about metrics and how important it is to measure everything that goes on in your organization; particularly with sales (or as I always call it the “Black Art”).

Why “Black Art”? Because even though it would appear that there is a correlation between ‘calls initiated’ and ‘sales dollars received’ (and there is - I assure you, there is!) the key measurement of selling success might be something as simple as ‘time spent listening to the economic buyer’.

I once had a business where we sold a program generator that created a rather specific type of application program along with its source code. Our software not only increased the productivity of an existing DIBOL programmer by a factor of about twenty, but it could also insure that the source code in all their customer’s programs was clean, commented, and even structured. Our key measurement of success was what we ultimately and respectfully referred to as “AISes”, or *sses in seats.

You see, we offered a deal whereby we would refund the customer’s roundtrip airfare to Pittsburgh (our offices were directly across the street from Greater Pittsburgh International Airport) so long as they bought a ‘Use License’ for our software package on or before 30 days from the date of their demo/visit. (By the way, in 1980, the first year of the program, we closed all but four of some ninety-plus demos/visits. At about $25K a license, that was a very good year.)

So, AIS, baby … AIS! (We even had a logo for this - but it was then, and remains to this day, unpublished.)

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“Daddy, why did the New England coach leave the field before the game ended?” asked my seven and a half-year-old son, Jaxon.

No kidding - one year ago, Jax didn’t know if a football was blown up or stuffed, but during this past Steeler season he learned that he could grab great handfuls of my time simply by taking an interest in the game. Just as I had done with my grandfather.

I thought to myself, “Do I tell him the truth … that Bill Belichick is pretty much a classless jerk? That he is a front-runner who loves to torment reporters (who are after all, simply doing their job) when he is winning, but who avoids them like typhoid fever when he loses?

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If you’re a Steelers fan (and who in this town isn’t), you know the orator of those words.

Bill Cowher (you remember....the guy BEFORE Mr. Tomlin) often talked, of course, about the fine line between losing and winning. Press him further and he will tell you that some seemingly inconsequential event - a missed block (physical detail), or a blown assignment (mental detail) will inevitably magnify into either a fatal or near-fatal mistake.

Business is no different than sports, or war for that matter. They are really all the same when it comes down to what I consider to be the two most important things that a business must consider:

1. Forecasting
2. Executing (or ‘Taking care of the details’)

Taking care of the details starts with making sure that everyone in the organization knows the mission of the company. If employees know that servicing the customer is most critical, their thought processes will always revolve around this overriding concern.

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